With the fading out of The Tango Center sometime this summer, there's been lots of talk about the past, present and future of social partner dancing, especially as it applies to downtown Eugene.

From 1900 to about 1960, between 10% and 50% of the city's population attended partner dances every weekend in downtown Eugene.

But there's a problem in the comparison ... partner dancing was not only the major form of social dance, it was the major point of live music at the time. Even rock-and-roll was originally played for partner dancing, and the styling solo moves you'd show your partner eventually became the solo-dancers-in-a-crowd system that took over the dance scene worldwide.

The problem now is obvious, often in the same facility. Like a dozen now defunct downtown venues, the WOW Hall, in its current building, held regular, never-preempted social dances. These would not conflict with live music, because live music was intended for dancers. But today, in the same venue, dancers can't have regular partner dances at the WOW Hall ... they get kicked out because they are a vast minority in the social and music scene.

In some sense, The Tango Center tries to overcome this problem, by nurturing live music for dancers. It tries to do this in an educational setting, so classes before the dances can act as social lubricant for the dance, and raise the level of people's dancing.

After the summer, how might partner dance look downtown? Well, a few venues will hold some dances now and then, but perhaps the dancers themselves may start to explore music that was not meant for dancing. A Mood Area 52 or a Taarka concert will have a few Tango-blues-fusion couples hanging around in the corners. I'd say they're getting the most out of the concert ... so maybe this will catch on. But some venues will have to give them space to do their own thing on a regular basis, so they have enough group coherence to take on these experiments.

Lord Leebrick Theatre just bought the building that houses The Tango Center. In a press conference, Lord Leebrick's artistic director said he was alerted to the existence of the buildings because the Tango Center went public with the troubled relationship with the landlords. Luckily, Lord Leebrick was able to buy the building for themselves: no landlord issues for them, ever again! Assuming the Tango Center can fit into some other space on West Broadway (although it's staying temporarily in the building) then this neighborhood will really start to become the thriving center of town it should be.

So, after revitalizing the block, and saving the affordable West Broadway arts neighborhood from destruction in 2007, The Tango Center has permanently saved the neighborhood. It may not get to stay there, but teaching 10,000 people to dance Argentine Tango, stopping Urban Renewal, saving a historic building, and providing a permanent home to DIVA and Lord Leebrick -- not bad for a six-year run!

The Tango Center in downtown Eugene is a unique institution with a perhaps not so unique set of problems.

The owners of the building have not given the Tango Center a lease for four years. This, by itself, would have made it difficult enough to keep the operation going, since it is very hard to maintain and improve a place when you could be kicked out in 30 days, at any time.

The Tango Center might have been able to organize its large community to buy its building, if it hadn't needed to fight twice to keep the entire neighborhood from being leveled. This catastrophic plan was launched once by the owners of the building, and then again by the City of Eugene. The last time, we had to organize a ballot measure to take funding away from the City's Urban Renewal district. We won that election easily -- no one trusts the City government to spend money wisely. And they are quite correct not to -- downtown is littered with craters where buildings should be. If the City had received the Urban Renewal funding it wanted, four City blocks would have been leveled, 25 local businesses destroyed, and in this economy, where OPUS and WG, the developers for those plans, are abandoning projects around the country, the downtown would have been flattened, and become a giant crater where no construction would happen for a decade.

But, somehow, through all this, The Tango Center still managed to hold the most amazing, life-changing dances. We hold 25 events a week and bring 1,000 people downtown each week. 10,000 people have taken Argentine Tango lessons in a City of 150,000. Over 10% of the population has partaken of some kind of event at The Tango Center.

We have one last chance to save the place. We're asking the City Council to buy the building, so that we can continue to hold all-ages dances, and so we can then buy the building back from City. Come to the Council Public Forum today, February 23, 2009, by 7:15pm, at City Hall, and speak your mind for 3 minutes.

I'd like to suggest a city-wide initiative for Eugene, Oregon.

In these tough times, citizens and supporters can give our local economy a boost, through a deeper understanding of how the web works.

If we cooperate to reach our true potential, to contribute our lives and works to the global conversation on the world wide web, we will make Eugene an international heavyweight. If the following strategies are pursued by everyone, with very little individual effort, everyone will benefit.

All for one, and one for all

Web strategies always have an "act locally, think globally" quality. Typically a business, in one location, usually acting alone, tries to get the world's attention. But imagine the effect of all Eugeneans and their institutions acting together, providing better information to, and hosting more relevant online activity for a global audience. It pays to help the world, as we will see in a moment.

Let's start with the basics.

Local and Global Rank

An important measure of a website's success is its rank in Google search results for particular search terms.

As an example, take this blog. If you type downtown Eugene into Google, you get a third of a million results, but this blog is listed as result number two or three. That's pretty good ranking, but that's only a local search term.

Let's look at a local website doing well on an international scale. When you type Tango into Google, as of this writing, you get 47 million web pages. Number 41, out of 47 million, is The Tango Center in downtown Eugene. This high international ranking helps the Tango Center to survive, which in turn helps the local economy. Think of it like this: we're the 41st most common application of the word 'Tango', worldwide.

Our extreme visibility on the web helped locals and visitors to find us. It led artists, musicians, performers, organizers and instructors to collaborate with us ... people have moved to Eugene and attended the University of Oregon because our website gave them a lively and full impression of the local Tango community.

If every project in town had this kind of global presence, linking and referring to each other, the overall ranking of everything in Eugene would rise. I'll explain this momentarily.

Strategies to achieve rank are called "SEO" or Search Engine Optimization. Individuals, companies and institutions invest a great deal of time, money and energy to achieve a high rank, for certain search terms. This "drives traffic" to their sites ... in other words, more people visit, more often.

Not just metaphors

Google's engineers work continuously to automate the process of awarding rank to websites. A website's content must be relevant, and the site must be linked, in relevant ways, to many other well-ranked sites. I think of this as a "heft" given a site by other "heavy" sites, a bit like a spider's web re-shaped by dew-drops of various sizes ... or, if you've ever taken discrete mathematics: this is like a weighted graph. Google uses the metaphor of websites "voting" for each other with links, providing "winners" for certain content on the web.

So, a critically important web promotion strategy is to get other good websites to link to your website. For example, if the Register-Guard writes an article about your business, make sure they provide their readers a live link (not only text of the link, but something the user can click) to your business.

It's quite reasonable to cooperate with other websites in this way, for mutual support, linking to each other to form a kind of connected subset of websites. This cooperative group needs to represent real diversity of origin, and the references to each other need to make sense ... Google has analytical methods that can sense feigned diversity, and sense "link farms" and the mere "trading" of links between sites.

Act Now

So, citizens and supporters of Eugene, let's cooperate to improve our mutual ranking, our relevant contributions, and our international standing.

Follow these simple rules:

1. Get ALL of your good content onto the web.
2. Make sure all of your web pages always link to any relevant local content.

In other words, a community must put itself online, to be globally relevant. This means that everyone must get to know the strengths and diverse qualities of their community, write about them, and link to them as much as possible.

All members of the community must become more self-aware, and more generous with promotion of each other, online.

To effect our real-world economy, we'll all need to do our part.

Eugene has thousands of under-promoted world-class businesses, websites, stories, people, etc. To give us our due internationally, we only need to cooperate with each other.

Meeting Potential and Fixing Problems

Let's look at an example with much room for improvement: a page in the Register-Guard online version of Ticket:

(Register Guard Ticket for Nov. 28 - Dec. 2, 2008)

Every line in this calendar could have local links, which would help to increase the ranking of both the Register-Guard and each of the artists, groups, businesses, venues, non-profits, agencies and sponsors involved. Some are local, some are not, but that doesn't matter. Associating the name and link of a non-local group or organization with a local venue or organization will help raise everyone's profile ... and that's how page rank is supposed to work. When you type into Google something like "Tango eugene oregon", you should get both The Tango Center and the artists who've been there, whether international, like Cecilia Gonzalez or local, like Mood Area 52. By helping to connect others, we raise our own profile on the web.

So, everything we put on the web must be stuffed with relevant hyperlinks ...

The Long Tail

But we also need to get more of Eugene onto the web. The tactic of putting volumes of relatively historic or obscure material on the web, targeting smaller, niche audiences, is usually referred to as The Long Tail.

For example, it seems that none of Eugene's local papers or magazines are trying very hard to get their back issues onto the web. Recently, The Register Guard even reduced its online content significantly. This immediately lowered their ranking on Google, reducing successful traffic to their site, and reducing traffic to everything in Eugene they write about.

This is a fixable problem, however. With available labor, improvements in scanning software, and initiatives by Google to get more content online, we could have every issue of The Register Guard, The Eugene Weekly, The Oregon Daily Emerald, Eugene Magazine, all the TV and Radio stations, and all their predecessors, online, earning ad revenue and driving traffic to other Eugene businesses.

Let's look at the University of Oregon, a potential helper in this city-wide initiative. Improving the chances of an appearance in search results of any kind of research, would help our local economy. An example off the top of my head: the UO is a world-leader in developmental biology, due to the success of zebrafish studies. However, if I type developmental biology into Google, and look at the results page, "Oregon" is not visible. I see Guelph, Canada, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and Arizona ... dig a little deeper, and you can see that this is because those Universities spend a little effort, and no money to speak of, to collect some resources for the public and for their colleagues. The Internet is a place where being helpful makes you popular! As we do this, we will in turn make the UO, Eugene and Oregon, successful.

In this example, how would that be done?

Lengthening the Long Tail

Imagine many helpful pages on Developmental Biology at the UO, linked to pages by all the students and staff of the relevant departments, which would then link to all their local and non-local connections and interests. Imagine if local developmental biologists initiated more international online cooperative projects, such as open-source initiatives, social networks, and wikis for developmental biology. These are simple to initiate, and not hard to make successful, if we actually use our wide international influence to do so. All these nearly cost-free efforts would improve web content, while promoting Eugene and the University.

The same efforts could be made by every employee and student in the 4J, the entire staff of the City of Eugene and Lane County, and every organization ... we need to uncover everything ... and get the entire city, its interests, quirks, opinions, history, research, findings, stories, photos, videos and arts online, and cross-referenced.

Anyone promoting themselves would do this ... but if an entire city did it, its online businesses' sales would increase dramatically, its non-profits and institutions would receive more grants, its population would be retained more often for its technologically savvy and innovation, and it would be providing the world with better information services.

Remember, anything you do will help. You can start right now ... use the comments section of this blog to promote Eugene and downtown businesses, non-profits, and special people, to the world. If you have your own web content, scour it for potential links, as in the calendar example above. If you have no web content: why not? Eugene is full of people with something to say. Get a blog, get a website, start a Social Network (here's one of mine), or publish pages on MySpace, Flickr, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, YouTube, Wikipedia etc. Create good web content, the best you can manage. Help your friends and neighbors to get online, show them what you've learned, think of new approaches, and, continually, link to each other. It's not only symbolic -- it will have a real-world effect!

For the past few months, The Tango Center, at 194 West Broadway, has hosted a diverse market-dance-art-cafe event known as The Weekday Market. It's every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, from 10am - 4pm, with extended hours during the First Friday Artwalk and this Friday's Downtown Holiday Party.

The Weekday Market was inspired by the building it is in: the only building ever built as a farmer's market in Eugene. As such, we have a year-round local organic farmer's market inside, usually on Wednesday and Friday, in cooperation with Lane County Farmer's Market. At any moment you can find meetings, yoga classes, dance practice, art events, live music, DJ'd music, and the normal diversity of a university-town cafe ... professors, poets, students, downtown workers, artists etc. It has wifi, a performance sound system, one of the world's best social dance floors, and a cafe with constantly changing menu based on the farmers' local produce ... translated into an Ethiopian and Argentine menu. There's locally-roasted fair trade espresso, empanadas, mate, soups, artisan bread by Il Forno Pane, and a wide range of artists.

We soon start a capital campaign to buy the building, which we would like to restore to its former beauty. The year-round market would complement our successful evening activity, The Tango Center: a non-profit, all-ages, community dance-hall and exhibition space.

First thought: It's quite sad that the Eugene Celebration charges $12 for the public to participate. It should be an open event ... the vendors would earn more, and this would in turn pay for talent at the event. People voted with their feet ... the free Saturday Market was packed beyond belief, one block away from the sparsely attended Eugene Celebration.

Second thought: The vendors in the street have been organized in such a way, that the back of the booths face the actual storefronts in the footprint. This means that there are four paths through the closed off street:



Amusingly, the Eugene Celebration planners tried to block off the sidewalk traffic flow in front of the permanent stores ! ... but, quite rightly, the stores would have none of that, and removed the impediments to the sidewalk traffic.

The simple solution: the stores and the booths should face each other, creating two lanes of traffic instead of four:



Note the positive effect this will have on the celebration visitor:

When we launched our non-profit public dance-hall, The Tango Center, one of our main incentives, was to provide places downtown where people could actually do something.

There's nothing wrong with going downtown to shop or drink, or take in a show or a movie -- but we wanted to see if we could successfully create a self-sustaining activity, by providing people an opportunity to learn from each other, and be creative with each other. Social dance, and Argentine Tango, seemed to fit the bill. But you could do it with almost anything.

There's another way to look at what we did. On the world wide web, the mantra for the last 10 years, or so, has been to encourage users to provide a website's content. "User-generated content" is populist, appropriately providing what the people want, because they actually did it themselves.

In the same way, a dance-hall provides people with the opportunity to create the evening they want. And each evening is, indeed, wonderful and different. There's a structure, but most great events need some structure: people can more easily express themselves in relation to something. Partner dances provide structure quite well.

So, an evening of dance is a "user-generated" event. At these events, everyione agrees, the most exciting stuff is on the dance floor, not on a stage or screen.

Maybe user-generated activity is the formula for a successful downtown. If organizers and entrepreneurs fill an area with opportunities for people to learn and be creative, then these activities will fill with people's energy, and get people out of the house, so they can test themselves, fulfill their own potential, and find their own meaning.

Citizens for Public Accountability has launched a series of meetings, called Downtown Together, intended to encourage new projects downtown. In order to try to bridge the gap bewteen a user-generated physical space, and a user-generated web space, the meetings are using software known as Urbanology, which is in the early stages of an attempt to create a networking and project community self-management tool, online.

When nurturing community, we generally try to:

1. preserve and enhance what we have
2. encourage community-based initiatives to solve community problems
3. recover the bits we've lost

Let's talk about #3 for a moment. There's a good standard argument, useful in launching this kind project.

When we launched the non-profit Tango Center, the criticism was made that Eugene was "too small" for a full-time partner dance venue.

At the time, we countered that, when Eugene was only a few thousand people, it had several crowded partner dance venues. At 150,000 people, it should be easy to develop a dance community of equivalent size. And it was.

Recently, during talk of a full-time, elected City Auditor position for Eugene, Portland's auditor interjected that "Eugene may be too small" to provide a pool of qualified candidates. However, he admitted, Portland has had an elected Auditor since it was smaller than Eugene. The past comes to the rescue again.

In a recent Eugene Weekly article about trams one City Councilor said "Our city is just at this point too small" for trams, to which another councilor "points out that Eugene had an extensive electric trolley system from 1907 to 1928 when the city was much smaller. 'Eugene had a very viable streetcar system when there were only 10,000 people here.'"

Plenty of people abuse the study of History at the "macro" level -- making specious arguments about leaders and movements etc. But the really useful history records the activities of everyday people in the past -- and these, if you can find them, provide a key, and excellent market research, for recovering the structures that support community.

In fact, there's nothing like a 100-year-old copy of the Yellow Pages, for inspiring new ideas.

A park, 1/4 - 1/2 of a block in size, across from the library, is a capital idea. But I've heard worries about its becoming a "problem". This is code for "poor people" and "youth". Hardly problems. We just have to make sure that everyone mixes well.

The Library Park provides a great opportunity for local economic development. Here are a few ideas to make this a lively public space:

Extend the library hours

There's no reason the library can't be open until midnight. The City could do a $5 "cover charge" for 9pm - midnight, and provide a band, to pay for the library staff. People would pay it. The Library Evening could become quite a scene ... lectures, music, literary circles, vendors, etc.

Extend the bus hours

Keeping LTD active later, especially on weekends, could pay for itself. Local venues & pubs can get involved in raising ridership, bus awareness and making the system easier to use. And, it could lower incidents of drunk driving.

Extend the Atrium hours

The ground floor of the Atrium is a terrific evening venue. Any number of local entrepreneurs would rent this space, charge a cover, and hold events there.

Vendors in the park

An incubation program for vendors, in collaboration with LCC and Saturday Market, would make the park a place to eat, snack and shop late into the evening. All that's needed is some rain shelter, awnings, arcades etc.

Vendors in the surrounding buildings

Arcades and awnings provide shelter from the rain ... if they are high enough, they allow sun through. Small shops, vendors and food providers can line the two sides of the park, and extend down the alleyway. This is a permanent market presence.

Benches, tables, chairs, awnings, fountains and amenities

Loose tables and chairs for people to sit. Fountains for people to splash around. Trees for shade. Bicycle valet parking for those willing to brave the elements. Awnings and tents to protect people from the elements.

Infill housing

We've identified a number of places to put housing on top of the surrounding buildings. And, of course, an affordable housing complex on the West side of the park, perhaps with a local CDC like St. Vincent de Paul's, with ground floor shops and a close integration with the park, would be ideal.

1/4 block of apartments: Student housing and affordable housing

The collapse of the speculative housing market doesn't mean everyone has a place to live:

a) Affordable housing -- the local St. Vincent de Paul is committed to developing affordable housing, and the site is city-owned.

b) UO Student housing -- the University continues to expand its housing on and off campus, but why not place car-less students (graduates, undergraduates, and their families) downtown? It's across the street from the fastest bus to the University, and would help to connect students to downtown.

Use your resources: The Tango Center, New Zone, DIVA, Bradford's, The Farmer's Market, etc ...

The surrounding small businesses, co-ops and non-profits are over-flowing with ideas, but are underfunded. They would all certainly take responsibility for programming activity, to connect the park to the rest of the Eugene community.

Portland's auditor recently issued a finding, that in Portland, areas with Urban Renewal funding have higher property values than areas without Urban Renewal funding. Even if that is your goal (Should it be? Why is expensive property a public good?), what kind of comparison is that? "Massive, wasteful spending" vs. "no spending at all"?

The problem is a lack of "political clout" among alternative revitalization approaches, to make a case for a comparison. For example, CDC's can efficiently create jobs with community-driven revitalization and incubation programs, but these are not compared with Urban Renewal. They should be. If you compared the economic benefit of government small business aid programs (all of which are gone now, like CITA from the 1970's) the efficiency of public benefit, as contrasted with Urban Renewal, would be extraordinary.

Having impoverished community-driven development in the past 20 years, Urban Renewal has eliminated the competition for tax money, freeing it for gentrification projects. Luckily, we can still refer all Urban Renewal spending to the ballot, but there must be organized opposition to do this. Most people aren't close enough to the City's schedule to know when it is possible ... but whenever you hear about "expansion of an Urban Renewal district" or "raising the spending ceiling on Urban Renewal", you can bet that someone is pushing to destroy some affordable neighborhood to benefit landlords and private development interests. If we all pay attention, and refer spending to the ballot, we can stop this horrific practice, in our respective Cities.